If you are wondering why Tumblr just raised $85 million, all you have to do is look at its pageviews. The super-easy blogging platform saw its pageviews jump from about 2 billion a month to 13 billion since the beginning of the year. It recently passed 10 billion posts, and is adding 40 million more every day. According to Quantcast, which directly measures the site, Tumblr attracts 72 million visitors a month, more than half of those from outside the U.S.
But its pageviews are really outsized compared to its visitors. In fact, Tumblr now generates more pageviews per month than Wikipedia, with only a tenth as many visitors, according to comScore. Tumblr is designed in such a way that it generates a lot of internal traffic between members. Investor Bijan Sabet recently noted that “logged in users drive the vast majority of the usage & page views.”
To get a sense of how much of an outlier Tumblr is when it comes to pageviews, let’s take a deeper look at the comScore numbers. (ComScore’s estimates are lower than Quantcasts, but show the same general trends). In August, Tumblr entered the top 100 sites comScore tracks (at No. 99) with an estimated 41 million unique visitors. But it’s estimated 6.5 billion pageviews a month places it at No. 21 among all sites ranked by that metric. By comparison, the Wikimedia Foundation sites (which includes Wikipedia.org) get 423 million unique visitors a month who generate 5.6 billion pageviews.
Tumblr is also bigger than Twitter.com in pageviews (but not in unique visitors), and is about half the size of AOL and Craigslist. Below is a snapshot of where Tumblr ranks in Pageviews compared to other select sites in the ComScore Top 100:
1. Facebook (503B PVs/month)
2. Google (272B PVs/month)
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13. Craigslist (12.5B PVs/month)
14. AOL (12.4B PVs/month)
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21. Tumblr (6.5B PVs/month)
22. Wikimedia Foundation Sites (5.6B PVs/month)
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28. CBS Interactive (4.1B PVs/month)
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32. Twitter (3.4B PVs/month)
33. ESPN (3.3B PVs/month)
Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is...
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